Worried that real estate will take the shirt off your back?

Even if you believe in the big, bad housing bubble -- that economic Freddy Krueger that's allegedly lying in wait, poised to filch our home equity -- maybe you still can find something to laugh about.

That's the aim of t-shirthumor.com, an online purveyor of shirts, coffee mugs, posters and other products that parody the news of the day. Its latest offering, as of about a week ago, is "Mr. Hou$ing Bubble," who bears a not-coincidental resemblance to Mr. Bubble, that staple of toddler bath time.

The company sold "at least a couple hundred" Mr. Hou$ing Bubble shirts at $19.99 each in the week after it was introduced, according to Tony Phipps, the Palatine-based public relations director for the firm, which is in Austin, Texas. Of those buyers, "a significant portion were to people in the real estate industry," he said.

Phipps acknowledges that some people definitely aren't laughing about the prospect of "taking a bath in the housing market," as Mr. Hou$ing Bubble invites. But he says his company specializes in trying to get people to lighten up about the issues they see in the news every day.

"Whether it's the housing bubble, a Supreme Court nominee, a politician or Tom Cruise's love life, some things are just begging to be jokes," he says.